HAPPY VALENTINE DAY
Valentine Day in the Franklin County Jail
(an excerpt from “Murder by Valentine Candy,” by Gregg SAPP — Evolved Publishing, 2021.)
Tati was angry, anxious, scared, and generally freaked out about visiting Huck in the Franklin County Corrections Center. The building was a gray square, and it cast a cold shadow over her. At the bottom of the stairs, a gauntlet of unpleasant-looking people paced back and forth on the sidewalk, holding signs that read Justice for Adam Erb, An Eye for an Erb, and You Can’t Kill the Truth.
This is for Huck, she told herself as she hurried past them.
Once inside the lobby, Tati felt relieved to have made it past the mob, but then it hit her that she was now in jail — aka, the clink, the slammer, the big house. No matter what she called it, this was a dangerous place to enter. She had an unpaid and long overdue parking ticket that, if discovered, she worried would give the cops a reason to lock her up, too. She’d heard stories about Hispanic friends and family being detained for less, like Uncle Mateo’s best friend’s neighbor who got pulled over for a burned-out taillight, and the next thing he knew was on a plane bound for Tapachula.
A uniformed cop barked at her to move along. When going through the metal detector, she set off an alarm and instinctively…
